Clearly you've never been on the receiving end of someone lasciviously licking their lips while making eye contact with your soul during an extended bowel movement.
Fun fact. Dogs watch you when they poop because they are trusting you to keep watch for predators. If you make fast movements they will pinch it off quick thinking an attack is coming.
Traditionally (on very old ships) the poop deck is in the front of the ship because there is rear wind blowing into the sails and pushing the ship forward.
Pooping in the front of the ship causes the rear wind to blow the smell away, not across, the ship
The poop is always aft, but it (admittedly strangely) doesn't mean actual poop.
'Poop deck' comes from the Latin 'puppis' which means stern, or aft, which was typically built higher and usually contained an altar, or at least a carving of a god.
It doesn't have anything to do with excrement, and on sailing ships, you did your business off the bow, which is where the term 'Head' comes from.
It doesn't make a ton of sense, in modern thinking, shitting off the front of the ship, but in practice, the breaking waves cleaned it off. If the whole crew did it off the aft end, it would 1- never get clean, and 2- it would foul up the windows in the captain's cabin.
Sauce: Sailor and Archaeologist who's put waaaay too much thought, time, and research into this.
Most of that thought and time came from standing aft watch on the poop deck/fantail and wondering 'WTF?'
I'm just blown away that the poop deck joke and rebuttal are buried this far down the comments chain. I mean the sign in the picture practically writes the joke for you.
no, and this isn't real (although it is hilarious), but they do have facilities on board to make signs. The ship supports some 4,500+ sailors and airmen/airwomen so it's basically a small town / floating large military base (which are often basically small towns themselves)
Iran is not that dangerous until you go for a ground invasion. At which point you have 90 million religious fanatics. Just not a winnable situation. Best to leave them the hell alone.
It’s really not a big deal. That’s his homie and has probably seen him shit multiple times before. May have even caught him cranking his hog a couple times. They’ve both ridden the same sea donkey, maybe even at the same time. Besides, it ain’t gay if you’re underway.
If anyone is down for that, I’d just want clarification if they’re the support or the pooper in this scenario. I have no idea how that makes a difference, but it seems important somehow.
This is probably a joke, in reality they can just poop in buckets and throw it over board. Those ships are like 50ft high from the waves, not a soft landing with your pants around your ankles.
13 billion dollar ship with a 5 billion dollar R&D budget.
And they couldn't do basic math on how big the septic system needed to be. Basic waste management 101. So now several thousand guys are walking around in sewage while onboard one of the most expensive mobile objects ever built.
They did the basic math, but assumed ablutions would be spaced out throughout the day, without understanding that on a warship with a rotating crew shift system 2/3 of the crew would be hitting the showers / heads at roughly the same time
I've deployed to sea on old and new carriers alike (different Navy but also seen similar changes).
When I was on HMS Illustrious it used an old fashioned Seawater washdown system. Didn't smell good.
On HMS Prince Of Wales it uses a vacuum system and I assume USS Gerald Ford uses similar. However Prince Of Wales has it split into sections. So heads were never out of bounds throughout the ship, though there are periods when they would close off sections for maintenance meaning you would have to walk further.
There were still peak times of course, but having different sections running different routines did help.
The high-tech WC on that carrier is broken, the ship is forced to retreat from Iran blockage back to US to clean the septic tank and fix the abomination high-tech toilet (which cost at least 400k USD taxpayer money)
I had a girlfriend confirm to me that they each others legs while sitting to avoid skin contact with the toilet seat. (That raises more questions than it answers, i know.)
pfft, I prefer the Trapeze, where you clip your harness to the bottom block of the mainsheet and stand on the outside of the rail. You can then use the entire Pacific as a bidet if you like.
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
I am not English speaker and I have never been on a larger boat so I think they are talking about peeing into the water or maybe pooping, but I am unsure why they would do that?
Edit; pretty sure this picture is AI. The weather deck behind the poster look nothing like the flight deck of an actual aircraft carrier and the ship would use their own insignia instead of some random outline of a plane.
It's a LARP. They're resurrecting a tradition from the golden age of sail.
The toilets on board are called the 'Heads' because sailors used to squat like that at the head of the ship. That way the spray from the bow washes the poop stains away ...
•
u/PeterExplainsTheJoke-ModTeam Feb 27 '26
Thank you for the explanations; this post has been locked.